Vidya Mytri Trust

Supported by: Wipro

Vidya Mytri, founded in October 2015 and operating in Koppal, Karnataka, aims to work towards education of the children from vulnerable communities. The founders of the organization include people with many years of experience and expertise in early childhood and primary education and working extensively in the North Karnataka regions towards teacher capacity building. 

The basis of Vidya Mytri’s work is the personal research of one of its founders, K T Margaret, into how and what children learn, which is documented in her book, The Open Classroom published by Orient Blackswan. Provide professional development support for govt. schools in the block of Kushtagi.

We started with this vision and mission and carefully planned it in order and found working successfully for four years. Problems we least expected and which we couldn’t cope with happened and we couldn’t continue as we planned. This forced us to take a few serious decisions and adapt.

Since ours is not development work but education and its effects on people we need to change our strategy. We concluded working with government schools closely it is possible to reach our vision and mission. 

Vision and Mission 

• Working closely with government schools we could reach out to the children most of them from poor family backgrounds to develop their self-confidence, discover their worth, and develop to the extent they could and thus become contributing members of their society and agents of social change in their environment.
• For this to happen, it is necessary to strengthen and stabilize the government schoolteachers to improve their understanding of how children learn and apply this understanding practically in their classrooms and experience some achievements and satisfaction in their work.
• To develop a resource centre where other organizations, groups, and schools interested in conceptual learning could come together to share exchanges, discuss their thoughts and ideas about children’s learning, and use them in their schools.

Location

The trust works in North Karnataka – its main work is in Tavaragera and the surrounding villages of Kushtagi block in Koppal district in North Karnataka.

Goals of the project supported by Wipro Foundation

• Work toward strengthening the learning and teaching of foundational literacy and numeracy in elementary grades of 09 government schools in Tavaragere Hobli Kushtgi Block in Koppal under the cluster development model.  

• Focus specifically on developing grade-specific competencies in literacy, language learning, and numeracy for the elementary grades in the 9 schools. 
• Work with 09 teachers in the clusters on foundational literacy and numeracy and intensive work with 2 identified schools poised to be demonstrative schools in the cluster.
• Develop user-friendly learning resources that equip teachers with new ways of teaching language and numeracy.
• Build on the cluster academic development program, by strengthening processes such as cluster resource meetings, and forums, towards building a community of practitioners aimed at better teaching-learning practices. 
• Invest significant energies in action research as they engage with children and teachers and make efforts to document and build case studies. 
• Build and leverage the systemic partnerships directed at stronger foundational processes, supportive structures, and a sustainable model of systemic work.
• Build the team’s organizational capacities further to evolve appropriate strategies, plans, and effective execution for long-term improvement in the educational capacities of the schools in the cluster. Besides this, to develop the team’s capacities to strengthen financial stability and strategies to secure sustained funding for their work in education in the region. 

Plans for the next 1-3 years 

Please provide a high-level summary of your plans for the next 1-3 years and a detailed plan for FY 2023-24; addressing the educational, organizational, and operational aspects of your work. From our past project experience in working with government schools going through much trial and error, and now reading the draft NEP2020, we feel confident we are in a slightly better position to have insightful learning in our present proposed program.

• Systemic Learning Reformation in Government schools. – (NEP implemented schools.
• Through this project we plan to build foundational literacy in language and numbers in government schools. 
• We plan to then develop two schools as model schools in the cluster, based on NEP 2020. We will work closely with these schools and teachers to support them in improving their classroom practice.
• Engage with the whole cluster of schools/teachers, through a multipronged approach involving periodic workshops, demonstration classes, preparing work plans together, discussions on teaching resources and practices, assessing children’s learning, and engaging with the community are some important aspects. 
• Work with government officials CRP, BRP, and BEO to involve encourage, and motivate to establish our working model to the wider range.    

Our working village must build an education resource centre (Community Learning Centre)

• To build and strengthen the capacity of the volunteers for the community.
• To develop and establish the community centre, and through this centre reach out to each child who has no access to the formal education system. 
• We plan to teach academics and life skills and guide and help them to continue their formal education through government opportunities.